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The usually at least soemwhat ebullient Charles Pierce wrapped up one of today's blogs with this cheery thought:

The only true resistance to whatever comes next is sadly confined to a civic and political imagination that has grown stunted and crippled, and a commitment to truth and to political involvement that long ago surrendered to distraction, flash, and meaningless intellectual junk food. The democratic muscles needed for pushback have atrophied almost to the point of uselessness, and that's alright because the institutions through which those muscles could be used are shells of themselves. Get ready for four (or eight) years of empty spectacle in the service of destructive policies that the president-elect doesn't care enough to understand.

If Bill Donohue wants to trade punches with Dan Barker and Annie Laurie, he's going to wish he hadn't. I know them both, and they are lovely people, decent and polite ... and They Don't Back Down from ANYONE.

Im guessing this is real news. There's a lot of fake stuff out there, so who knows? Plus, the Spectator is conservative, so this might be as real as Fox news.

"How was a gay Islamist porn star able to penetrate Germany’s intelligence agency?"

This story is also in the Washington Post - "Enter the unfolding case now of a porn actor-turned-Muslim-convert-turned-spy-turned-Islamist turncoat.

“It’s not only a rather bizarre, but also a quite scary, story that an agency, whose central role it is to engage in counterespionage, hired an Islamist who potentially had access to classified information, who might have even tried to spread Islamist propaganda and to recruit others to let themselves be hired by and possibly launch an attack”

All very weird. When I was a graduate student, I knew another student who was a gay midwest blue-eyed blond convert to Islam. That struck me as strange then too. As far as I knew, he wasn't also a porn start.

As always, I like to hear about what is happening, and how we can respond to it. We have challenges, but we are not helpless. There is a lot to worry about there and I can't deny that I feel it too. Historical precedents suggest that we are in an era of growing authoritarianism. The media make money and grow influence by making things as scary as possible, too. But I'm not going to tremble in a corner. Neither should anyone else.

Im not going to suggest that "They are coming for us" but the history of that is meaningful and tells us what not to do, anyway. As Martin Niemöller said, "

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out."

In our day and age, we have mass social medial. We have ways to speak out. We have millions of allies. We need to focus on what matters, and what to give up. Maybe we need to be strategic. Wedding cakes, photo services, and flowers don't matter. Employment, housing, finances, and other essential services, do matter. Personal safety matters. If there is legislation focused on specific groups, everyone should speak out against it.

Remember - "They" also feel persecuted. It's wrong, but that's what they feel. Telling "them" they are evil monsters, will not change how they feel. Demonstrating common humanity, "we are you" even if we look different, aiming for fairness, and the sense that a most people want to think of themselves as fair and not-evil. We should also do some introspection to come up with how we have failed, what we can do better, where we should focus.

Loren - terrifying is the word. And if you want to see something even more terrifying, get a load of what Steve Bannon said a couple of years back in a speech to the Vatican:

And as president of the advisory board of the Human Dignity Institute, he [Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke] was also in charge when none other than President-elect Donald Trump confidant and chief strategist Steve Bannon gave a speech at the Vatican in 2014, during which he warned the church to stick to its conservative ideals or face apocalyptic repercussions. “We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years,” Bannon said in his address.

Bertold, the bill you've alluded to in your last post is – and this is not a word I use often or casually – terrifying. It could effectively walk the social gains of the last half-century back to null with the stroke of a pen.

My only hope is, if that foolish thing becomes law, that there can be a sufficient civil reaction to it to cause those in power to at least rethink their actions. Sadly, those currently in power mostly don't have the thoughtfulness to rethink much of anything.

Wow! Bertold my head is spinning with how fast the right wing is destroying decades of progress. This would be even worse than 1950, because this would be outright codified national law, not a loose collection of various laws and traditions of hate.

Yes, I can see that a family name might die out in a few generations without laws permitting gay folks to adopt or have surrogate-assisted kids. Thanks for sharing. I'm bi but chose to not have kids because of an inherited birth defect and type 2 diabetes from my mother's side. My not very bright siblings made up for my choice by way over-producing.

I don't know if i should put something personal here, but I will. What is it with my family? My gaydar tells me that of 6 kids (brother, cousins, me) in my generation, at least 3 were/are gay (one is dead but maybe just mentally ill and not gay) and one is maybe asexual. Of the next generation, the oldest is a college freshman and just came out of the closet on Facebook. No wonder my name is so rare. My grandfather had 3 sibs who lived to adulthood, but only he married and had kids himself (3) and I wondered about one of those. No wonder my name is so rare.